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One of the highlights of Lab Day, which takes place this year at EMBL Heidelberg on 22 July, is when EMBL celebrates the very special work of alumni through the John Kendrew and Lennart Philipson awards. All staff and alumni are invited to attend the ceremony

Light sheets ahead

Ernst Stelzer, former EMBL Cell Biology and Biophysics Group Leader, has been selected as the 2016 Lennart Philipson Award winner. The award, which recognises outstanding contributions to translational research and innovation, was given to Ernst for the development and application of new light microscopy methods. Ernst is now Professor at the Goethe University in the Life Sciences Department and in the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences, in Frankfurt. “Light sheet-based fluorescence microscopy is the result of more than 25 years of hard work,” Ernst says. “As a member of several Units, I saw the limits of ‘flat biology’, the challenges of studying specimens in 3D, and the necessity for time-lapse imaging. But, crucially, I also had the resources to tackle challenges in a biological manner.”

Charting the way

Former EMBL Genome Biology PhD student, Jop Kind, has been selected as this year’s John Kendrew Young Scientist Award winner for pioneering postdoctoral work in establishing novel technologies to map chromatin domains in single cells. Jop, now Group Leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, has also received the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek prize for young researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. “I am deeply honoured to find my name among this select group of excellent scientists who have won this award,” Jop says. “The innovative and out-of-the-box approach to research at EMBL really shaped me as a scientist and was hugely important en route towards independence.”